Dave Bakke: How the Capitol dome lights were lit

Saturday

Dec 21, 2013 at 9:50 PM

By Dave BakkeStaff Writer

About those holiday lights on the Illinois Statehouse dome, the ones I wrote about a few weeks ago saying maybe it was time for a change. It’s funny how people can see the same thing, but it brings to mind something completely different.

Some Springfieldians see those lights and, yes, they think about the holidays, but they also think about Thomas Clay.

Tom was an electrical engineer who worked for the state in the early 1960s. His work is an important reason those lights are there each year. Back then, Tom was working for the Illinois Department of Architecture and Engineering when he designed the electrical system that made the lights possible. As close as his family can estimate, the lights first went up about 1963.

Tom is retired and living in Arizona now, working on recovering his speech after a recent stroke. But his family just wants me and you to know that there is more to those lights than meets the eye.

Tom’s first cousin is Sandra Basksys. She still lives in Springfield, as does Tom’s brother, Ed. Sandy recalled the origin of the lights and Tom’s role in it in an email to me.

“For Springfield’s Kohlrus and Clay families,” she wrote, “the Capitol lights also bring memories of our relative, Tom Clay ... who helped create the Capitol’s traditional holiday display lights. He engineered the electrical requirements of the display, if not the entire design which, despite its elegant simplicity is so colossal in scale that it remains a major logistical challenge to set up and take down even today. From a hard-scrabble childhood, Tom rose to light the largest landmark in his hometown.”

Tom’s work has largely been lost to history. And with his health, he isn’t able right now to tell the story himself. I searched the newspaper archives for an old story from our paper, certainly we would have made a big deal out of this when the lights first went up, but couldn’t find it.

I did find, however, another Christmas story in the newspaper about Tom. In 1965, Tom and his wife, Maria Angeles, went to her native Nicaragua. Their goal was to distribute clothes to children at Christmas.

“We did that a number of times,” says Tom and Maria’s son, Mike. “I think we made a total of seven trips.”

That 1965 story said Maria (better known as “Angie”) had come to the U.S. to learn English and enroll in business college. She was living in San Francisco when she met a young Navy man, Tom Clay. They married and came to Tom’s hometown of Springfield to live for a few years.

He worked for Pillsbury Mills before joining the state. Tom and his family left Springfield in the mid-1960s when Tom went to work for Morton Salt in California. He went on to be a project manager for The Chunnel under the English Channel and the Jubilee Line, a train in the London Underground.

“This (the holiday lights on the Illinois Capitol dome) was probably one of his first large projects that he took on,” says Mike, who lives in California. “What’s significant about it is what he did there set the stage for a large part of his career. He went on to oversee very large projects and this was the first.”

A couple of years ago, Tom and Mike returned to Springfield for the funeral of Tom’s mother, who was a Kohlrus. “We did a trip down Memory Lane,” says Mike. They were still impressed by the grandeur of the Statehouse dome that Tom helped light.

Going with something new wouldn’t diminish Tom Clay’s engineering feat that has lasted 50 years. But knowing about him does shed a different light, so to speak, on a longtime Springfield tradition.

Know of something quirky? Emotional? Funny? Inspiring? Dave Bakke is your man and his deadline is always near. Pitch your idea to him at dave.bakke@sj-r.com or at (217)788-1541. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. To read more, visit www.sj-r.com/bakke.